Author: CRAIGHEAD (George):
Title: The Nature and Place of Hell Discovered: or, a Fair Conjecture that the Sun is the only Tartaros, or Receptacle of the Damned; and that there is both Everlasting Material Fire there to torture the Body, and Inward Sorrow to torment the Soul. In Answer to a late, but atheistical Pamphlet, entituled, Heaven open to all Men; or, a Treatise solidly proving from Scripture and Reason, that without unsettling the Practice of Religion all Men who now are, or hereafter will be upon Earth shall be saved, or made finally happy. By the Rev. George Craighead, Late Minister of the Gospel in Virginia (now in London) and author of the Blow at modern Crutches.
Description: Edinburgh: Printed for the Author, and sold by Gideon Crawford in the Parliament-Close, and other Booksellers. MDCCXLVIII. 1748. FIRST AND ONLY EDITION. 8vo (in 4s), pp. [vi], 36, 19th century half calf, marbled boards, red leather label; corners a bit worn but a very good copy. In his survey of matters infernal, the historian of ideas Damian Frank Pearson notes in his study that George Craighead and another thinker, Tobias Swinden, contended that hell must be in the Sun: "Tobias Swinden (1726) and George Craighead (1748) both argued that Hell could not be in the earth as there would be no room for all the dead and not enough air and fuel to keep the fires burning for eternity, and Hell had been created to confine the fallen angels after the revolt in heaven. The location of Hell could not be in the earth. Their place for Hell was within the confines of the Sun, with the sun-spots being the gateways to the eternal fires. Craighead also challenged what he saw as the heretical and atheist views of Abraham Oakes (1740) and Charles Povey (1740), who both argued that hell had no place at all but was a state of mind borne by the disembodied spirit after death" (Descending Caves: Descent Narratives and the Subterranean Science and Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1830, doctoral thesis, 2018, p. 120). No doubt, George Craighead's Nature and Place of Hell Discovered (1748) will be an adornment to any collection of books on underworlds or dystopias -- or, indeed, on early astronomical theory. This is the first and only edition of the work, ESTC T78018, the database finding only two copies in Britain (British Library and the National Library of Scotland), and only four copies in the United States (Huntington Library, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library of Virginia, and the Union Theological Seminary). The ESTC locates no copies elsewhere.

Keywords: hell pseudo-science prose


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